Ethereum (ETH)
Basics * Short explanation: Developer platform, as well as programmable contracts and money. * Longer explanation: Ethereum utilises smart contracts, which allow somebody to send money to another person automatically, but only when a certain set of conditions are met. For example, during the process of selling a house, the buyer and seller could enter into a smart contract that transfers ownership to the buyer, and money to the seller automatically once a deal has been reached. The other major benefit Ethereum holds is its developer platform, that allows decentralised applications (or Dapps) to be built on top of Ethereum. An easy way to think about this is that Apple or Microsoft allow developers to build applications on top of their software, and Ethereum takes a similar approach. It has its own functions, but also allows other developers to use its blockchain to build new applications and uses. This has also given rise to ICOs (initial coin offerings) being held on Ethereum’s network. ICOs allow developers working on new blockchain technologies to raise money by selling off tokens in their future application. * Current issues: Ethereum has a few issues at the moment. It is suffering the same scaling problems as Bitcoin due to the inherent size of their transaction capacity. It’s become clear since the crash of crypto prices in early 2018 that the market for Dapps is much smaller than first thought, so Ethereum is experiencing slower than expected growth. There are also other platforms such as EOS creating similar technology that claims to be simpler to use, which are putting pressure on Ethereum in the long term. * Yellow Paper: 4-2014, published by Dr. Gavin Wood, this would serve as the technical bible and de-facto specification for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)* Yellow Paper: 4-2014, published by Dr. Gavin Wood, this would serve as the technical bible and de-facto specification for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) * Stiftung Ethereum established 6-2014, in Zug * 11-2014: first Devcon * Date of trading launch: 7-8-2015 * Ethereum is a decentralised smart contracts platform for Dapps. It is most widely known for all of it's children tokens that were created by ICO's. More then 20.000 tokens have been created this way. * Touring complete scripting language * Has, as of 2-1017, 6 implementations of consensus: C++, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, and Haskell. But many implimentations are not being maintained anymore (C++, JS, Ruby, Haskell, Python, Erlang, C#). "I'm happy that we plan more clients in the #Ethereum ecosystem, but please remember the ghosts of the past (C++, JS, Ruby, Haskell, Python, Erlang, C#). We're walking on a graveyard of abandoned clients. Almost nobody realizes the effort involved in keeping Ethereum alive. https://t.co/bhrchUUL4V  — @peter_szilagyi" * Had a Premine and a Presale/ICO. 550.000 eth went to Vitalik, Other founders/co-founders got between 200 and 450.000 ETH. 6 mil in total to the team. Vitalik also got 150.000 ETH through their dev program, which handed out 3 mil ETH to developers. * Highly deflationary economic model * Coincap: none for now, will change after switching to PoS * PoW, but will change to PoS * Uses accounts instead of UTXO’s (as Bitcoin does) * The proof of work algorithm used is called Ethash (a modified version of Dagger-Hashimoto) involves finding a nonce input to the algorithm so that the result is below a certain threshold depending on the difficulty. * Has a choice of clients: its main ones being go-ethereum by Geth (written in Google’s Go programming language) and Parity (written in Rust). Also has Pantheon Core now by PegaSys. * Through the efforts of Slock, Ethereum can also be deployed on low-resource Ubuntu Core images Team * Has a huge community of developers, projects and foundations. For a info graph, check here * Butterin, Vitalik; founder, council of the Foundation * Lubin, Joseph, co-founder, came on in a later stage then Di Lorio and funded a bigger chunk of money. * Di Lorio, Anthony; came on in the early early stages before the presale and provided early funds * Lubin was eventually introduced by Di Iorio to Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s then 19-year-old creator and boy genius of crypto. Having read Buterin’s November 2013 Ethereum white paper, Lubin got in on the ground floor of the Ethereum project and attended the group’s foundational meeting in Miami in January 2014. He continued as part of the core group through Ethereum’s $18 million initial coin offering in July 2014 and was rumored to be one of the biggest buyers during the token’s initial crowdfunding, at prices estimated to be well below a dollar. Ultimately, Ethereum’s founding team bickered and parted ways. Buterin continued to focus on the technology, while Lubin hatched his plan to create a business ecosystem around Ethereum. * Casey Detrio; long-term Ethereum developer * Chan, Ming, Executive Director * 'Evan' * Gerring, Taylor; co-founder * Hoskinson, Charles; funded Vitalik after reading the whitepaper, is credited as a co-founder. Later moved over to ETC and then started Cardano * Hudson Jameson; long-term Ethereum developer * Jeremy Wood, left and asked Charles Hoskinson to start IOHK with him * Lombrozo, Eric; helped keep the presale bitcoins secure with his multisig wallet company, syfrex * Mougayar, William; special advisor * Nerafoff, Steven; “Steven's innovative work as the legal architect of Ethereum's record setting token sale continues to be the basic structure used throughout the world today. Steven innovated the concept of "utility", specifically using the concept of "gas” or “fuel” for legal purposes.” * Lane Rettig; well known dev * Wilcke, Jeffrey; founder, Ethereum Foundation; Technical Steering Group * Wood, Gavin; founder * Zamfir, Vlad; works on PoS, but left to work on Casper at Casper Labs * Tual, former CCO * Leverington, Alex; “has been involved with Ethereum as a core developer since the very beginning. He worked at ETHDEV, where he architected and programmed devp2p, Ethereum’s underlying P2P protocol layer. Alex has made key contributions in Ethereum encryption and security, primarily touching the various communications protocols. He remains active in the protocol steering group.” * Colbin, Greg, Dr.; “works on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for Ethereum DEV, also joined the team. His work includes pushing the boundaries of EVM performance and evolving the EVM architecture and Ethereum specification. Greg has had decades of technical experience inventing algorithms, designing systems, and programming applications and servers. His experience includes building and leading world class teams.” * Ying Zhang; A senior developer of Ethereum. Senior engineer, from Huawei and served as CAO and CTO of several companies. * Joseph Poon; proposed Plasma: A Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts, along with Vitalik Buterin * Bob Summerwill, former developer * JPMorgan, Microsoft, R3 CEV, IBM, Santander; investors * Microsoft's Bletchley platform is anchored on the Ethereum blockchain * Have created an Ethereum Enterprise Alliance which connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with Ethereum subject matter experts. * Recently joined forces with Hyperledger Companies who build on Ethereum * Amazon * BBVA * ABInBev * BNP Paribas * Ciox * BP * Citi * Coinbase * Comcast * Fidelity * Foxconn * Google * Hewlett Packard Enterprise * HTC * Intel * Microsoft * Northern Trust * Overstock * Siemens * Samsung Hard Forks List of protocol updates and Hard Forks: # Olympic pre-release (testnet, Chain #0, 9-5-2015) # Frontier public release (Ethereum Genesis, Chain #1, 30-7-2015) # Homestead (Block #1,150,000, 14-3-2016) # DAO Fork (Block #1,920,000, 20-7-2016) split with Ethereum Classic # DoS Fork (Block #2,463,000, 18-10-2016) # Spurious Dragon (Block #2,675,000 22-11-2016) # Metropolis will be done in two phases: Byzantium & Constantinople (has been on it's way since early 2017, got postponed to 2019 Update: Constantinople and St. Petersburg hardfork occurred successfully, including the most notable upgrade of reducing the new supply issue of reward per block which dropped from 3 ETH to 2 ETH with EIP 1234; Constantinople was originally due to go live in January but was postponed after the discovery of a potential security vulnerability; the two main Ethereum clients, Geth and Parity, stayed in sync with the correct block number, capping the first hardfork for the ecosystem in about two years) # The Serenity upgrade (with no due date attached) famously includes scalability solutions sharding and Casper, a hybrid consensus mechanism involving a combination of Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). Together the two solutions have been dubbed “Shasper.” Serenity The new model will look like this: * Main Chain: This is the previously known original Ethereum Blockchain. * Beacon Chain: This is a coordination and validation layer. Its consensus algorithm is Casper (PoS). The Beacon Chain replaces Miners with Validators. If a validator wants to participate in the validation of Shard blocks, it must first deposit a fixed amount in Ether in the Validator Main Contract (VMC). The VMC is a smart contract that is stored on the main chain. The Beacon Chain regularly checks the Smart Contracts for new validators and then adds them to a list. The waiting validators are then assigned to random shards from this list. In addition, existing groups of validators are regularly shuffled. This sampling process is critical to the safety of Ethereum 2.0. Because of the random distribution, the validators cannot make any arrangements with each other and can execute 51% attacks on individual shards. * Sharding Chain: This is where the Smart Contracts are executed and their data is stored. Ethereum has oriented itself here to traditional databases and their sharding techniques. Both transaction processing and blockchain data storage are divided into several computer groups called shards. Each shard is like its own small blockchain. Ethereum addresses, account balances, and smart contract data are divided among these shards. When a transaction is sent to the network, it is executed in the shard that has the address that signed the transaction. As a result, only a subset of all computers on the network need to complete this specific transaction, significantly reducing the burden on subscribers. Before Serenity can complete Phase 0, there are two points on the agenda. After the upgrade of Constantinople in February 2019, the last planned hard fork Istanbul is scheduled for October. In addition to the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain, the old Ethereum PoW Blockchain is to be retained as the main chain. This original blockchain will be continuously updated and improved. These future changes will be summarised as Ethereum 1.x. Development of Ethereum 1.x will also begin in 2019 before the Beacon Chain is launched. An update on how ETH 2.0 with shards will work can be read here. Pro's and Con's Advantages * Turing Complete allows a very broad range of Dapps to be programmed on the platform * Largest following amongst blockchain developers * Arguably the best developer tools * Large corporate support through the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) * Concise programming language suitable for blockchain Risks * A repeat of the DAO hack on other software developed on the platform due to the room for error and unfamiliar programming language * Slower uptake due to unfamiliar programming language * Superior tech may overtake it * Uncertainty surrounding PoS shift Category:Coins/Tokens